Notes from Malcolm Gladwell’s Masterclass (Malcolm Gladwell Teaches Writing): Writing is just like a puzzle. You have to find a way to fit all the pieces together. Imperfects are what draw people in. You should mildly irritate the reader. Leave them with a bit of an aftertaste. What is interesting? That’s what drives writing. Be interesting. Give the reader tools. They’ll be inclined to use them (and keep reading). Data is interesting. You just have to find how to connect it with the reader. Make them care about the data. Your writing is the main course. But don’t forget to give the readers some candy. That’s what they’ll talk about. Your job as a writer is to keep the reader going. Invite the reader into the same process you’re going through. Thinking about what you’re going to withhold (what you’re not going to say) is an important part of effective writing. Suspense is when you expect to have been told something by now, but you haven’t been. Surprise is when you’re told something, but you had no idea it was coming. Narrative is just the resolution of problems. Be free to follow your curiosity, even if it doesn’t appear to lead anywhere. Find stories that speak for themselves. All great stories have an ending that transports you somewhere. That takes you somewhere different from when you began. Writing about yourself is hard. The standards are high, and you’re always fighting the assumption of self-absorption. What you find interesting and what your audience finds interesting aren’t perfectly aligned. Part of the challenge with stories about ideas is framing them in a way that makes sense to people. “My goal is to write at an 8th grade level, with ideas that are extremely sophisticated.” Writing should be simple enough to not defeat the reader. Use long sentences sparingly (but your audience will enjoy them if they’ve been setup appropriately). Punctuation is how you establish rhythm. It’s important to read aloud everything you write. You don’t really understand writing until you hear it. Your language is a function of who your audience is, the medium you’re writing in, and the subject. It’s easy to make someone laugh. It’s much harder to make them cry. Being funny is very hard when there’s an expectation you’re going to be funny. Never announce you’re going to be funny. Humour is just a pleasant deviation from expectation. Great titles have a contradiction. They create tension. They create a conflict. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Sometimes, it’s enormously clarifying to figure out how you want to end a story and work backwards. You’ll know what information to withhold, what will maximise the audience's surprise and suspense etc. Your ending should be the moment of maximum emotional response (and your story should end very shortly after that). I never react to being stuck by stopping. Your first draft should be complex and messy. Your second draft should be simple and polished. Edit for clarity. The business of writing, is the business of creative a competitive advantage for yourself. What can I do to be different from everyone else? You don’t necessarily have to be better, you just have to be different. If you write something interesting, the system will find you. People get a lot of pleasure from investigating the contents of other people's mind. All good non-fiction is giving people a window into other people's minds. Often not the writers but someone else.